GM Caught With Their Pants Down, Again
If you follow the industry news, you’ll know that the sales of pickup trucks and SUVs are on the rise. Ford is having a stellar year with a lineup of fresh new vehicles and inventories to match. Over at General Motors, it hasn’t been so great. They are rapidly losing light truck marketshare to Ford and Ram, and it’s not the first time they’ve made such errors.
According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, GM dealerships are plagued with not having enough inventory. While the company has released a slew of new cars in the past couple of years, you all know that car sales are rapidly on the decline. GM dealerships are selling every single truck they get in, but they aren’t getting them fast enough to meet customer demand. Ford does have enough trucks to satiate customers, and are seeing strong results.
When fuel prices were in the stratosphere, GM plants were pumping out more trucks than anything. They’d sit and sit and sit because consumers wanted small, fuel efficient cars. Now that prices are low, they’re caught on the other end of the spectrum. However, they don’t seem to be in any real big hurry to increase production capacity by adding more plants. They’re playing a long game focused more on increasing transportation costs and growth in the urban and ride-sharing arenas.
In the meantime, Ford is working on those things, but they’re also selling a metric crap-ton of trucks, vans, and SUVs. They also seem prepared to continue to do so in the immediate future.
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via [The Wall Street Journal]
